


The Wicked Witch is Dead

by Alex_deMorra (Ergo_Sum)



Series: Fence Sitter [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-15 01:45:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8037373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ergo_Sum/pseuds/Alex_deMorra
Summary: Chapter 1: Fence Sitter
Micah (now in his mid-30's) gets news that his grandmother is dead.





	The Wicked Witch is Dead

“Hey listen, Micah. I’m calling to let you know that your grandmother died this morning.”

My first thought was _finally_.

I really disliked her. I didn’t hate her but only because I didn’t care enough. I just couldn’t stand being with her in the same place at the same time.

Three months ago, she called me. She never called me. Not once in the twenty years since I left home and not once in the ten years before that. And I was happy with that. But when she called, she said, “Love baby, I don’t have long in this world. I’d like to see you at least once before I die.”

I said I would come to see her. Maybe I would take her out for dinner. But I didn’t mean it. I never wanted to see her again and, perhaps strangely, I chose not to be honest, to come right out and tell her of my intentions, because I didn’t like what that would it mean about me to be able to say that to a dying person.

What’s supposed to happen, what I’m supposed to feel, what I’m supposed to _do_ is to rise above my petty shit, raise up my boots and go see the old woman.

But I couldn’t.

A month after her phone call, it happened anyway. It was my dad’s birthday and my brother in law Simon made arrangements to pick her up.

“She’s always loved Simon,” said Laura, my well-coiffed step-mother, the one who decked out the house in the winter as if it were a high end department store but made sure to serve latkes to my dad along with one or two couples from the club that identify as social Jews as part of an intimate celebration of the one true meaningful jewish holiday of the year: Hanukkah. “Rebecca only loves men.” This was said to the family members in front of her, all of whom nod because they knew what my grandmother was like. All of them realized that Laura was telling the truth. Mostly. Eyes shift and the court Laura was holding went quiet. She turned to see me standing behind her, “Well, you know what I mean, dear.”

And I did. I know in Rebecca’s eyes I wasn’t one.

And though she’s never said it and, actually, she’s said things and done things in order to show me how much she disagreed with my grandmother on this topic, I’m not sure that Laura thought of me as a real man either.

Simon and his family arrived in a cacophony. His wife Darla, my step-sister, who was genuinely one of the coolest people I knew and looked suspiciously like Brooke Shields (after all, I have never seen the two of them together in one room), was draped with children. The baby was perched on one jutting hip and supported with her right arm, the middle child was holding her left, and the oldest child had her hands loosely wrapped around her mother’s right thigh. Simon was behind her with two car seats in the crook of his arm and, on his other side, as she held on for dear life, was my wizened grandmother, looking as frightening as she ever had.

She smiled hard and wide, exposing all of her teeth, yellowed and worn down to cream colored and gold target-topped nubs, shaped by years of gnashing them at night. “Love baby! You made it.” Her arm reached out and grasped onto my forearm so that her nails made divots in the fabric of my long-sleeve blue cotton shirt. “You and I are sitting together tonight.”

“That would be lovely.”

We were brought to a room of the restaurant with two tops and four tops laid end-by-end, which took up most of the walkable space and also allowed the fifteen of us to sit all together.

I make an effort to study the menu but she won’t have it.

I turn to look at her. I notice that the bright red hair that she had always styled with hot curlers is thin, faded to a brassy blonde, and like straw, stick straight. The scars from several plastic surgeries are more obvious now that she’s older. There is a divide all along her chin that separates smooth and delicate to wrinkled, pink with age spots to weathered tan. It is also noticeable with her hairline, which looks to be a full inch behind where I remember it to be. Her eyes were bright green, made more so by her red-lined lids, as if she’d been crying, though I know she hadn’t been.

“Your mother. I know all of the horrible things she did to you,” she told me in an urgent voice. “I saw the bruises. I walked in once and couldn’t believe what I saw. I couldn’t believe the things she told me.”

She went on in detail to describe her experience as a witness to events I had long since blown off. I can’t deny that her telling me all of this was a balm. Almost as much as the one I felt when my mom apologized for the same series of events. She told me things I knew and things I didn’t. This was so big in her mind, telling the things she needed to tell me, that when the server came to take her order, she looked up, hardly realizing where she was, the request for food made no sense at all to her.

So I helped her order something I knew she liked. Chicken over pasta with vegetables and a light sauce that would be salted heavily once it was put in front of her. She might eat a quarter of it. But she would drink at least half of the kid-sized root beer, just as long as it didn’t have any ice.

Once the server finished taking the orders from the table, my grandmother turned back to me with menace in her eyes. “You have got to get that Laura away from your father. She will take him for everything. She’s a selfish person. She’s only ever thought about herself. She’s not good enough for him.”

Laura is the reason that my dad has a weekly date with his mother.

Laura is the one who arranged a place at a comfortable living center less than a mile way from their house so that she would get more family time.

Laura is the reason my grandmother gets presents and visits and invites to family occasions.

And, yeah. Laura probably married dad for his money, and she might be the reason we’ll have no inheritance. She can honestly be terrifically and epically self-centered.

But my dad is passionately in love with her. He has been for two decades. And quite frankly, she makes him deal with his shit and he’s a better person for it, far better than he was when he was with my mom.

So, no. I have zero reasons for wanting Laura and my dad to split up.

“Promise me, Micah. Promise me you’ll protect him.”

“I think he’s pretty happy with her.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise that I’ll look out for him.”

“Thank you, love baby.”

Her meal arrived. It was steaming and colorful. She pondered it gleefully, “Oh, doesn’t this look good?” Then she held her fork up and kept it perched there.

“What did you get?”

“Lasagne.”

“Oh.”

She put her fork down, capturing my attention again. “Micah, you were such a beautiful baby. And smart. Just like your father. I hope you can find your way in this world. I really do.”

It was one of the nicest things she said to me. If she had only stopped, that would have been a great last memory. But she went on.

The entire thing was overheard by Simon, who pretended not to listen.

At the end of the meal, dad came to sit with her while Simon and I got drinks. “God, she is one bilious bag of spewing poison, isn’t she?”

“Yup.”

“Sorry, I didn’t believe you.”

“No problem.”

That night was the last time I saw her.

Her will was read hours after her passing. She stipulated that only three people were allowed to come to her funeral: my dad, my aunt, and Simon.

It was a thinly veiled _fuck you_ to Laura. The rest of us didn’t care.

Except for my sister, who went out of her way to make sure that our grandmother got to know the family’s only grandson. The sad thing is, my sister probably mourns her passing more than anyone else. Not because she liked our grandmother but because our grandmother had been the last, living connection to our _history_. A history our grandmother wouldn’t talk about and when it did come up in conversation, she would contest it no matter what it was.

She had a unique perspective on the world and a horrible, twisted, fucked-up way of loving the people around her. Why my sister would use her valuable energy to spend on such an easy person to want to avoid is beyond me. Maybe, my sister just likes to fight entropy and this is just another opportunity to justify the effort.

My sister is kind of like that.

I was there when my sister recapped my grandmother’s last week with her son. When she was done, he said, “Mom, I get that she was important to you but, honestly, she was scary.”

He was eight.

I helped to pack away her condo. Though she’d moved at least a dozen times in the past three decades, she still had the same velvet paintings and the same crystal lamps hanging at her bedside. She had eighty-seven rolls of toilet paper and a picture of my mom and dad with my mom’s face brutally cut out with scissors.

There was a similar photo with my dad and Laura.

I thought there were no other pictures in the house. Not of her daughter. Certainly none of her ex-husband (the asshole). None of me or her only grandson. None of my sister.

But then I found one. It was a polaroid of her and me. I was a newborn and she was holding me, beaming, on a black La-Z-Boy recliner. She was wearing a hideous mustard yellow polyester mock turtleneck and her hair was in a tight bouffant of orange curls. I could practically smell the residue on her fingers from the Pall Mall Blues that came in a hard pack.

On the lower right-hand side of the picture, was a thick stamp of lipstick in a medium coral. It looked more like she held the photo in her mouth — maybe as she was getting something from her car or her purse — than an actual kiss.

But it didn’t feel like it.

**Author's Note:**

> Copyright 2016 by Alex de Morra


End file.
